I'm finding myself much in agreement with slavicdiva (interesting handle), who strikes me from her posts as a very smart, articulate lady. I was particularly touched when she descibed how her father used to brush her hair when she was a child. I thought, "what a beautiful image". It seems "canoodling" with one's children is a poor choice of words. It makes something pure into something prurient. Only in a sexually repressed, religiously obsessed environment like we've had during the Bush era, can we even be thinking that giving love and touch to children is in the same universe as a couple raising the temperature in a restaurant.

And what about those we love? Paricularly during this time, how appropriate is it to express that than with a hug or a kiss or some other means of making us feel connected?

I realize there are those who think the Puritan years were America's grandest, but those years were punctuated with more violence and savagery too. We have a war in Iraq now where people are being needlessly slaughtered. That's okay, but a mom squeezing her 10-year old son is somehow depicted as sick and twisted. Surely anyone sane will discern the true depravity here.

Just wondering: is canoodling even a word? Makes me think of some pasta dish gone horribly wrong.

with a very cuddly and affectionate 11 year old daughter. I'm glad she likes to cuddle, and I know that eventually she'll outgrow it. But I am very nervous about admitting it -- I'm even posting anonymously just to make sure. Fathers acting affectionate to their daughters is just creepy to a lot of people. Or maybe I just THINK people will find it creepy.

Yeah, Linda, you're a regular riot. Stop it. You're killing me.

What are the odds that the very next article I read on Salon would feature a mother-to-be complaining about the very thing that makes motherly canoodling possible?

From the piece on Heidi Klum's postpartum panties:

"What's it all mean? Stevens writes, 'It's as if the female body were divided into two completely separate, compartmentalized functions: being sexy (or rather, providing the ready-made answer to the Victoria's Secret marketing slogan, "What is sexy?") and propagating the human species. Any cause-effect relationship between these functions was neatly severed...'"

Frankly, I found the essay refreshing. It's rare that a participant in America's self-congratulatory Parent Culture is able to punch through that cotton candy-colored world and get a clear-eyed look at it from the outside; even rarer for one of them to then assess the view honestly.

Much is made of "mother love" in our culture. It is perhaps the only myth (or perhaps I should type "Myth") that rivals that of romantic love in our social consciousness. Mother love is selfless. Mother love is unwavering. Mother love is unconditional. Mother love is pure goodness. Mother love is, above all, completely unique. There is no other love like it, and it is like no other form of love.

These are the stories we tell ourselves. More accurately: these are the self-congratulating stories Parent Culture tells us. And really, agreement is not optional. Just try openly dissenting from these myths sometime.

The ironic fact is, we all know better. We know better because each of us knows what our own mother is like. For the vast majority of us, happily, we never doubt our mother loves us. But, for an almost equally large number of us, we start realizing fairly early in adulthood, if not sooner, that mother love comes with strings attached, and we start learning to "handle" or "manage" our mother so she doesn't take over our entire lives. Running their children's lives is what mothers do, after all; it's what they begin doing even before the child's birth, and continue doing -- controlling the clothes, hairstyle, vocabulary, every detail of behavior and [self-]identity, making the child into what mother always imagined her children would be -- until the child, finally, puts up enough of a barrier to keep mother out.

Obviously, children, young children especially, need someone to make those decisions for them for a while. It's called "parenting." My point is not that the love that leads a mother to parent her child is evil; merely that it is not selfless. Occasionally, our language betrays our awareness of that. We'll speak of "investing" in our children. One does not "invest" selflessly; one expects something in return.

Mothers, almost without exception, derive great pleasure from their children. A large measure of that pleasure is emotional. And yes, part of that pleasure is physical; sensual. It can even be, as other have noted, sexual. (These are inconvenient truths uncovered by those pesky biological sciences the Religious Right -- the ultimate defenders of sexless mother love -- keep trying to slur, and "shelter" their children from.)

We, as a society, tolerate (even celebrate) behavior by mothers in parent-child relationships, that we would call the police on a father for by telling ourselves the Myth of Mother Love. Ask yourself how you would feel if you glanced over at the food court and saw a father doing with his 10 yr. old daughter the things Ms. Baker was doing with her 10 yr. old son. We tolerate "canoodling" and similar behaviors in mothers by pretending it's a different species from the canoodling of couples. We don't even want it spoken of with the same vocabulary. It makes us feel "icky." It makes us outraged and angry.

So I say "Brava!" to Linda Baker for speaking truth to power.

I have three children, two girls and one son. My youngest attends a university on the east coast and when she comes home during the school year and during the summer it is not unusal for her to sit on my lap or to cuddle with me on the couch. Of my three children, my youngest is the one that has remained "the baby" to me, yet all three, ranging in age from 32 to 20, still need a mommy hug or to sit on my lap, despite the fact that they all three dwarf my physical self during these moments...

I have never had sexual feelings towards any of my children. I breast fed all three and the experience was unpleasant at best. I never experienced pleasure from my breast's being stimulated until I was well past the age of fifty.

Although I am close to celebrating my 40th wedding anniversary, I have never been the type of person to engage in public displays of affection with my children or anyone else for that matter, including their father.

As a society, we Americans tend to be prudes and much of our society frowns upon public display of affection, even between family members. I think one of the things that most of us need is a hug, a well placed kiss, or merely a warm pat on the back that conveys acceptance and support. We have ingested a fair amount of fear into our schools and teachers and administrators are prohibted from giving a sometimes much needed gesture of affection to a child who needs more than a "good job, or well done" to encourage a child to try just a little bit harder, or to a child who has suffered an earth shattering loss. We have become a suspicious and intolerant society and the fact is, each of us needs a little bit more love and affection to get us through the day and even more so during the tough times.

If this mother and son are comfortable sharing time and physical nearness, then they should be allowed to share it whenever and wherever the need strikes them without recrimination from the rest of us.